Essays in Empirical Productivity Analysis
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Oxford
Department Name: Economics
Abstract
Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.
People |
ORCID iD |
| Markus Eberhardt (Principal Investigator / Fellow) |
Publications
De Visscher S
(2020)
Estimating and testing the multicountry endogenous growth model
in Journal of International Economics
Eberhardt M
(2013)
Do Spillovers Matter When Estimating Private Returns to R&D?
in Review of Economics and Statistics
Eberhardt M
(2019)
The Magnitude of the Task Ahead: Macro Implications of Heterogeneous Technology
in Review of Income and Wealth
Eberhardt M
(2012)
No Mangoes in the Tundra: Spatial Heterogeneity in Agricultural Productivity Analysis*
in Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics
Eberhardt M
(2013)
Structural Change and Cross-Country Growth Empirics
in The World Bank Economic Review
Eberhardt M
(2012)
Estimating Panel Time-Series Models with Heterogeneous Slopes
in The Stata Journal: Promoting communications on statistics and Stata
Eberhardt M
(2011)
ECONOMETRICS FOR GRUMBLERS: A NEW LOOK AT THE LITERATURE ON CROSS-COUNTRY GROWTH EMPIRICS ECONOMETRICS FOR GRUMBLERS
in Journal of Economic Surveys
Eberhardt M
(2011)
Is the Dragon Learning to Fly? An Analysis of the Chinese Patent Explosion
in SSRN Electronic Journal
Eberhardt, M
(2017)
The Magnitude of the Task Ahead: Macro Implications of Heterogeneous Technology
Soderbom, M
(2014)
Empirical Development Economics
| Description | When economists empirically investigate matters such as why some countries, like South Korea, have developed phenomenally over the past five decades, while others, like those in Sub-Saharan Africa, have not, they typically employ models which assume that how these countries employ labour, capital and material inputs to create output is identical across countries. As means of comparison, this is like saying that in to make pancakes, we would use an identical recipe (100g flour, 3 eggs, etc.) everywhere and always. Furthermore, they (typically unknowingly) assume that what goes on in one country, say the United States, is not affecting what takes places elsewhere, say, Greece --- to be more precise, it is assumed that if there are 'externalities' then these are identical across countries. This would for instance imply that the fallout from the US sub-prime mortgage crisis is assumed to have the same effect on China, Greece, the UK and Ireland (which is patently not the case). My research has challenged both of these assumptions and has shown that they are violated across a variety of applications (mainly related to 'productivity analysis', i.e. how countries produce output from input, and how much technical progress or innovation has there been over a certain time horizon). The implications of this finding are quite profound, in that they have direct bearing on important policy questions. For instance, ongoing work related to my paper on agricultural productivity ('No mangoes in the Tundra') has established that the production relationship in agriculture (again, we can think of the recipe used to make pancakes as a useful analogy) differs systematically across climate zones. With my co-author Dietrich Vollrath (Houston) I establish that this 'technology heterogeneity' affects the pace at which countries can transform themselves from economies with most employment in subsistence agriculture to economies where a sizable share of the population work in 'modern' sectors (manufacturing, services). This is important, because it helps explain why some tropical countries have not witnessed the phenomenal structural change (and ensuing growth in income per capita) of some temperate emerging economies (South Korea, now a rich OECD country, had the same income per capita as Ghana in the 1960s). If they had the same technical progress and innovation in agriculture, a temperate country would be able to shift more workers out of agriculture than a tropical one. This also helps support the notion of 'appropriate technology', meaning that agricultural innovations in temperate climes may not be very productive in tropical or highland ones. An alternative example is my ongoing work with Andrea Presbitero (IMF) in the relationship between public debt and growth. Again, allowing for different countries to have a different relationship and not assuming away externalities we come to very different conclusions than the existing empirical literature: there is no evidence for a common threshold for the debt/GDP ratio (e.g. 90%) for all countries. This finding flies in the face of the justification used by politicians on both sides of the Atlantic to argue in favour of fiscal austerity measures in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. |
| Exploitation Route | The notion of cross-country heterogeneity and cross-section dependence which is central to my empirical work is now beginning to catch on in the wider empirical literature. I am confident that over the next decade this empirical approach will provide radically new insights into a range of important fields with relevance for economic policy. |
| Sectors | Education,Government, Democracy and Justice |